What I Learned from IBB: A Personal Reflection at 85

Baba Yunus Muhammad

As General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida marks his eighty-fifth birthday, I find myself reflecting less on the office he once occupied and more on the man I came to know and regard as my Maigida. To me, General Babangida has always been more than a former Head of State. He has been my Maigida—a Hausa expression whose meaning goes beyond the literal “master of the house or mentor.” It carries a sense of an elder, a host, a person of standing under whose presence one feels received, respected and guided.

Public figures are usually remembered through the positions they held and the decisions they made. Those who have had the privilege of knowing them personally, however, often remember something different: the mannerisms, the conversations, the silences, the temperament and the qualities of character that do not always appear in official histories.

My own association with General Babangida has been part of my intellectual and personal journey for many years. Looking back, I realize that some of the lessons I learned from him were never formally taught. They were lessons absorbed through observation. Three qualities stand out particularly in my memory: sophistication, patience and endurance.

By sophistication, I do not mean simply an appreciation of refined living, although General Babangida certainly has a distinctive and sophisticated lifestyle. I mean something broader—the understanding that leadership involves an appreciation of people, circumstances, presentation, timing and the subtle dynamics through which human beings relate to one another.

He understands the importance of presence. He always understands that how one receives people matters; that how one listens can be as important as what one says; that difficult situations often require composure rather than agitation; and that leadership involves navigating the visible and invisible dimensions of human relationships. That was something I observed and learned from my close

I learned, too, the value of patience. In a world increasingly driven by immediacy, patience is easily mistaken for weakness or indecision. My observation of General Babangida taught me otherwise. There were moments when his ability to remain calm, listen and allow circumstances to unfold appeared to me to be part of his strength. Patience is not the absence of action. Sometimes it is the discipline that makes effective action possible.

A leader who responds to every pressure immediately can easily become a prisoner of the moment. Patience creates space for thought. It allows emotions to settle, information to accumulate and possibilities to become clearer. That lesson has stayed with me.

There is another lesson in patience that I learned from General Babangida, and it was perhaps one of the most subtle. He once told me that he deliberately tried not to remember the assistance or good turns he had rendered to people. His reasoning was simple but profound: if he kept an account of what he had done for someone, he might unconsciously allow that memory to influence his response when the same person returned to him in need. By choosing to forget what he had already given, he believed he could remain free to help that person again, without resentment or the feeling that he had already done enough.

I found this deeply instructive. It was not merely a lesson in generosity, but in freeing oneself from the psychological burden of keeping an account of one’s goodness to others. To give and then forget the giving is, in its own way, an expression of patience, humility and inner freedom. Perhaps that was the deeper lesson he taught me: that the finest form of giving is one in which the giver does not keep a ledger against the recipient. Once a good deed has been done, it should be released from the mind as well as from the hand.

So has endurance. Nigeria’s public life is not an easy terrain. It is a landscape in which political fortunes can change rapidly and in which yesterday’s reputation can be reassessed by tomorrow’s generation. To remain relevant to the national conversation over several decades requires an unusual capacity to endure. I watched that quality in General Babangida.

It taught me that a long journey cannot be measured by the difficulties encountered at particular moments. There are seasons in which one is celebrated and seasons in which one is criticized. There are moments of triumph and moments of disappointment. What matters is the capacity to remain standing, to preserve one’s dignity and to continue the journey These lessons also influenced the way I chose to engage with the Babangida legacy intellectually.

In 2000, I organized a two-day symposium at the Hill Station Hotel in Jos, held from 13–15 October, under the title: The Babangida Regime: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation. The choice of title was deliberate. I did not want to organize a gathering merely to praise Babangida, nor did I want to create another platform for political condemnation. I believed that his administration was too consequential to Nigeria’s history to be reduced to either extreme. It deserved serious examination.

The symposium brought together papers and presentations intended to examine the regime from different perspectives. It was an attempt to step away from political emotion and create room for intellectual inquiry. Looking back now, I realize that the exercise represented something larger than an event.

It was an attempt to preserve memory. Political administrations eventually disappear. Political arguments lose their immediacy. People who once occupied the centre of national affairs become subjects of history. But ideas, arguments and documented perspectives can survive. That conviction led to the next stage of the journey.

The papers and presentations from the symposium were subsequently brought together in two volumes published under the title Heritage of Reforms. On 17 December 2002, the two volumes were publicly presented in Kaduna, with Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings, former President of Ghana, as Special Guest of Honour. I remember those milestones with particular satisfaction.

The significance of Heritage of Reforms was not that it provided a final judgment on Babangida. It did something more useful: it preserved a body of intellectual engagement with an important period of Nigerian history. That distinction remains important to me.

I have never believed that respect for a mentor requires intellectual surrender. Indeed, I believe the opposite. A genuine intellectual relationship should encourage one to think, to question, to examine and, where necessary, to disagree. My appreciation of General Babangida has never required me to pretend that his administration was without controversy or that every decision taken during his years in power was beyond criticism.

History is too important for that. What my personal association gave me was an opportunity to look beyond simplistic representations and to appreciate the complexity of a human being who had occupied one of the most demanding positions in Nigeria at one of the most difficult periods in the country’s history. That distinction between the public figure and the human being is something I have come to value deeply.

The public sees decisions. The individual experiences the circumstances surrounding them. The public sees the headlines. The individual carries the memories. The public remembers the consequences. The individual remembers the uncertainties, pressures and calculations that preceded them. None of this removes responsibility from leaders. But it reminds us that understanding is deeper than judgment.

Perhaps, one of the most important things I learned from my association with IBB is: never reduce a human being to a single chapter of his life. A person may be celebrated at one point and condemned at another. Circumstances may change. History may reinterpret yesterday’s events through today’s knowledge. But the human being remains more complex than any single narrative.

This is particularly true of General Babangida. For me, he has been not merely a former Head of State, but a personality from whom I observed qualities that became part of my own understanding of leadership and human conduct. Sophistication taught me the importance of understanding one’s environment. Patience taught me that not every battle requires an immediate response. Endurance taught me that a difficult chapter does not necessarily define the entire journey.

And the experience of organizing the Jos symposium and subsequently producing Heritage of Reforms taught me something else: that intellectual engagement can itself be a form of service to history. Perhaps that is why I look back upon those events with gratitude.

The symposium was held more than twenty-five years ago. The presentation of the two volumes followed more than two decades ago. Yet the significance of those moments has, rather than diminished, grown with time. Time has a way of transforming experience into perspective.

What seemed at the time to be an event has become part of a journey. What appeared to be a professional undertaking has become a piece of one’s intellectual inheritance. What was once simply an association with a public figure has become, in retrospect, a relationship from which one has received lessons that could not have been fully appreciated at the time.

That is how I now see my association with General Babangida. A Maigida does not always teach by instruction. Sometimes he teaches by example. Sometimes by temperament. Sometimes by the manner in which he responds to adversity. Sometimes simply by allowing another person to observe closely enough to learn. For that, I remain grateful.

As General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida reaches eighty-five, my tribute to him is therefore deeply personal. It is not a declaration that history has settled every question about his years in power. It is not an attempt to replace historical scholarship with personal affection.

It is simply the testimony of someone who has had the privilege of observing a remarkable personality at close range for more than three decades, and of carrying with him lessons from that experience that have endured long beyond the moments in which they were learned.

A period, I learned sophistication. A period I learned patience. A period I learned endurance. A period I learned that history deserves to be examined rather than merely remembered.  Above all, a period I learned that a mentor’s influence may endure long after the immediate circumstances in which that influence was received have disappeared. Today, I look back with gratitude—not only for the memories, but for the intellectual journey they helped inspire.

The Jos symposium of October 2000, Heritage of Reforms, and the Kaduna presentation of December 2002 are now part of my own history. They remind me that sometimes our most meaningful encounters with history are not the moments when we stand at the centre of events, but the moments when we help others to understand them.

That is how I choose to remember my association with General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida. And so, on his eighty-fifth birthday, I say to my Maigida:

Happy birthday, Sir!

May Allah grant you continued health, peace and wisdom. May the years ahead bring you tranquility and the satisfaction of knowing that, beyond the offices you once held and the political history surrounding your name, you have touched individual lives in ways that official history may never record.

I am one of those who remain grateful for the lessons. And some lessons, once learned, remain with us for life!

Baba Yunus Muhammad is President of the Africa Islamic Economic Forum (AFRIEF), an intellectual, writer and policy advocate whose work spans Islamic economics, governance, political thought and ethical development. His writings focus particularly on Africa, the Muslim world and the relationship between leadership, economic justice and civilizational renewal. He has engaged with public affairs and political leadership for several decades.